The American Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce the inaugural Irving Kristol Lecture and Summit—a fully virtual event that will showcase the vitality of AEI’s scholarship and celebrate the ideals of free enterprise and opportunity for all.

The 2020 Irving Kristol Award recipient, Nicholas Eberstadt, will deliver the keynote lecture, and the summit will feature conversations with AEI scholars and highlight their important contributions to the policy debates. This event will convene the AEI community to recognize Eberstadt’s boundary-pushing scholarship and explore how we can ensure that all people share the benefits of the free enterprise system.

COVID-19 cases are surging throughout the United States. This threatens public health, economic outcomes, and our children’s futures. Where does the nation stand on these important issues, and what is the outlook for the fall?

Join public health expert Scott Gottlieb, economist Michael Strain, and education scholar Frederick Hess for a discussion of the nation’s outlook going forward. The panel will discuss progress toward a vaccine, testing and contact tracing capabilities, the state of the economy, what should be included in the next economic recovery law, and how schools can safely open in the fall.

Six years ago, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi delivered his first sermon as “Caliph” of the newly minted Islamic State. Today, Islamic State branches are thriving globally despite territorial defeats in Iraq and Syria. The US is negotiating a drawdown in Iraq, withdrawing from Afghanistan, and assessing force levels in Africa. Is the US again declaring victory too soon? And what comes next for the Islamic State?

Please join AEI’s Katherine Zimmerman for a virtual conversation with a panel of experts on the Islamic State, its ideology, and its operations. They will discuss the Islamic State’s strategy, how it interprets its own successes and failures, and lessons the Trump administration should draw from past counterterrorism operations.

The Iowa caucuses are famous for their impacts on the race for each party’s presidential nomination, and, compared to the rest of the country, in rural Iowa, voters’ pocketbooks are disproportionately dependent on farm subsidies and the corn-based ethanol industry. In addition, current agricultural programs, including the recent Trump administration trade war compensation payments, have incentivized farmers to “farm the subsidies instead of the market,” making them increasingly dependent on Washington.

How necessary are those agricultural subsidies for the survival of the agricultural sector? Where do the candidates stand on the issue of subsidies and the role of markets in ensuring the country has a successful agricultural sector? Ahead of Iowa caucuses on February 3, AEI scholars discussed the various agriculture policy proposals from the major presidential candidates.

As a proud member of NATO and the EU, Estonia exemplifies the Western orientation of the Baltic states and has been a key player in advancing democracy, transatlantic cooperation, and cybersecurity at the state level. However, recent challenges — in the East and the West — risk stifling this cooperation and the post–Cold War global order. Both the transatlantic alliance and the values that unite it are being questioned on all fronts.

Please join AEI for remarks by Estonian Prime Minister Jüri Ratas on how to preserve the transatlantic alliance from these challenges. After his speech, AEI’s Leon Aron will lead a discussion, followed by questions from the audience.

This June, the Women’s Bureau in the US Department of Labor is celebrating 100 years of advancing the well-being of working women. From its inception, a central focus of the agency’s work has been childcare.

Family childcare — provided in homes rather than institutional settings — is the preferred choice of many working women. Running a home-based childcare business has also long been an important avenue for women’s entrepreneurship, especially in low-income communities. Yet since 2005, the licensed family childcare sector has lost almost 100,000 providers, declining by 44 percent.

While Russian election interference caught most Americans off guard in 2016, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were not surprised. From the Czech Republic to the Balkans to Georgia, Moscow has used tactics ranging from coup attempts to the funding of political parties and disinformation campaigns to meddle in domestic politics. What lessons can the US apply from these countries’ experiences to defend its own elections?

Please join AEI’s Ivana Stradner and Frederick W. Kagan for a virtual conversation with a panel of Central and Eastern Europe experts. They will discuss the threats Moscow’s meddling poses to their countries, how their governments have responded to Russian hybrid tactics, and what lessons the US should draw from their experiences.

“We’re all in this together” has become an inspirational rallying cry amid the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shutdowns. But never before have Americans been so far apart. Children are out of school. Our neighborhood pubs and coffee shops are empty. Main Streets are deserted, and workers do not see their colleagues anymore.

How are communities surviving and adapting while communal gatherings are banned? How are families, which depend so much on community support, faring under the added stress?

Was the COVID-19 virus produced in the US? Was it created by the US Army? So Moscow and Beijing would have you believe.

Russia and China aggressively manipulate perceptions to achieve their own aims. Their increasingly aggressive information campaigns are converging in method and narrative. What can the US and its allies — and the average citizen — do to inoculate against these disinformation viruses?

For the fourth and final episode in a miniseries centered around a new Oxford University report on “Citizenship in a Networked Age,” Adam White is joined once again by two of the report’s co-authors: Professor Andrew Briggs and Dr. Dominic Burbidge.

They further explore issues raised in the previous two panels’ discussions of “Community, Platform, and Institution” and “Algorithmic vs. Democratic Decisionmaking.” They then turn to the report’s final recommendations, with an eye to the value of civic unity and empathy in fractious times. How do our most personal relationships—with family, friends, neighbors—shape the way we act as citizens in a networked age?

For the third episode in a miniseries centered around a new Oxford University report on “Citizenship in a Networked Age,” Adam White explores democratic and algorithmic decisionmaking.

Can we draw a clear distinction between the two categories? How should we understand them in terms of efficiency, accuracy, dignity, and other values? He’s joined in this conversation by Cary Coglianese of the University of Pennsylvania, Maleka Momand of Esper, and Ari Schulman of The New Atlantis.

For the second episode in a miniseries centered around a new Oxford University report on “Citizenship in a Networked Age,” Adam White is joined in conversation on “community, platform, and institution” with David Brooks of The New York Times, Yuval Levin of AEI and National Affairs, and Christine Rosen of Commentary. They discuss how our relationships, our communities, and our social institutions are channeled and changed by internet platforms – and what, if anything, ought to done about it.

We encourage “audience participation” in this event. If you have questions for Adam White or the authors of “Citizenship in a Networked Age,” we ask that you please send them to Adam.White@AEI.org or tweet them @Unprecedential.

It’s
obvious that we live in a networked age, but it is not obvious how to
understand the effects that modern technologies are having on the way will
live, love, relate, and govern. How are social media and other Internet
platforms shaping us — and how should we shape them?

A
new report from University of Oxford and Templeton World Charity Foundation, “Citizenship in a Networked Age: An Agenda for Rebuilding our
Civic Ideals
,” attempts to reckon with such weighty matters, seeking the
relationship between human nature and modern technology. Do the classical paradigms of citizenship account for this
networked age? What virtues ought we cultivate to promote human flourishing in
our new public square?

Following his convincing electoral victory, Boris Johnson still faces two daunting challenges. The first is to negotiate a permanent economic relationship with the European Union by the end of 2020. The second is to maintain the integrity of the United Kingdom following the Scottish National Party’s strong showing in the election.

Our panel of experts, to include the EU and Irish Ambassadors to the United States, discusses Johnson’s likely success in meeting those two challenges and the economic and political implications of Brexit for the UK and Europe.

COVID-19 has devastated the US economy, disrupted the nation’s food supply chains, significantly affected federal and state safety-net programs for low-income households, and catastrophically damaged the financial well-being of tens of millions of families. These impacts are disproportionately disrupting the lives and incomes of the most vulnerable populations — perhaps especially children, single-parent households, the elderly, and the homeless — leading to increasingly widespread concerns about rising food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition for those populations.

Diane Schanzenbach, Scott Winship, Angela Rachidi, and Joseph Glauber join Vincent Smith, director of agricultural studies at AEI, to discuss the food supply and food insecurity issues created by COVID-19 and current and potential policy responses to address the critically important challenges that the nation faces.

North Korea is the world’s most repressive state — and the Organization and Guidance Department (OGD) is the key apparatus in Pyongyang’s administration of tyranny. The OGD may be little known in the United States, but, according to North Korean defector Jang Jin-sung, it is “the only entity that actually matters when it comes to decision-making or policy-making” in the Kim family regime. But what exactly is the OGD, how does it operate, and why do North Korea watchers, American policymakers, and human rights activists need to know about it?

Robert M. Collins lifts the veil on this ominous apparatus in the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea’s new report “Organization and Guidance Department: Control Tower of Human Rights Denial”. Enjoy this panel discussion with Nicholas Eberstadt on the report and the latest research about the OGD.

Three days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, AEI’s election experts convened for the first Election Watch event of the 2020 campaign.

With interest in the 2020 elections at record levels, AEI’s Election Watch team returns to help you navigate 2020’s important contests. The panel of experienced analysts will discuss fundamentals including the calendar, the contestants, and the contours of the 2020 electorate. They will examine what has happened thus far in the race and what it means for the next contests, including South Carolina on February 29 and Super Tuesday on March 3. In addition, they will take an early look at the 2020 Senate and gubernatorial races and discuss the strength of the political parties.

More than 20,000 youth age out of the foster care system every year. Independent research and government statistics reveal stark outcomes for these young adults, including disproportionately high rates of incarceration. Some experts now claim there exists a “foster care-to-prison pipeline,” calling into question the efficacy of removing children from their homes and decrying the lack of supports offered to transitioning foster youth.

Foster youth face serious trauma, but there is nothing inevitable about their trajectories. Indeed, the interactions between child welfare and law enforcement agencies may be creating more problems than they are solving. Please join AEI’s Naomi Schaefer Riley as she leads a distinguished panel of experts on the challenges facing former and current foster youth and their intersection with the criminal justice system.

In his new book, “Trade Is Not a Four Letter Word: How Six Everyday Products Make the Case for Trade” (Avid Reader Press, 2020), Fred P. Hochberg, chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States from 2009 to 2017, presents an enjoyable and insightful defense of free trade. Drawing on the history of American trade policy and the contemporary reality of intertwined supply chains and taco salads, he explains why and how the current populist turn toward protectionism threatens the welfare of consumers, workers, and entrepreneurs and undermines US foreign policy goals.

Join AEI’s conversation about Mr. Hochberg’s new book and the politics, economics, and everyday glory of international trade.

Americans are living through a social crisis. In our politics, it expresses itself in polarization and division. In our culture, it looks like alienation, anger, and despair.

While social analysts blame factors such as rising inequality or liberalism’s collapse, these explanations are incomplete. The missing ingredient, argues AEI’s Yuval Levin, is the dissolution of our institutions and a transformation of what we expect of them. In “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream” (Basic Books, 2020), Dr. Levin explains how institutions have devolved from molds to platforms, fueling cynicism and resentment that leads citizens to rally around firebrands who promise to further shatter these systems.